Chelsio Communications, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, announced it has broken through the 10 microsecond (μs) latency barrier for 10-Gigabit Ethernet -- a new record, according to the company. Chelsio has developed a TCP (Transport Control Protocol) offload engine (TOE) in silicon, significantly raising the performance and latency bar for 10G Ethernet adapters. Chelsio is also the first to deliver 10G iSCSI in silicon.
Chelsio is demonstrating its host bus adapter this week at the Grid Today 2004 conference in Philadelphia. In the demo, Chelsio's solution will be shown transmitting standard 1500-Byte Ethernet frames in a peer-to-peer configuration at 7.9Gb throughput with less than 10 microseconds latency from user space to user space and 50% CPU utilization with a 2.2GHz Opteron-based server. The line-rate performance of the adapter stays consistent with equal and stable bandwidth per TCP connection, whether there is one or 10,000 connections. Chelsio said the best performance other 10GE adapters on the market can claim in transferring standard Ethernet frames is only 3 to 4Gbps, with higher latency and more than 100% CPU utilization. http://www.chelsio.com
- Chelsio is headed by Kianoosh Naghshineh, who previously was CEO and president of ASIC Designers, Inc., an intellectual property firm providing silicon cores for communications-systems markets. Prior to that, Kianoosh was one of the primary architects of the Origin supercomputer at Silicon Graphics.
- Chelsio's investors include Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Global Catalyst Partners, Pacesetter Capital Group and Horizon Ventures.
